Recently, AT&T announced the establishment of a joint venture with BlackRock Alternatives, a private equity firm, to deploy optical fiber connections to as many as 1.5 million new locations. Importantly, these locations will be located outside the cable network coverage of AT&T’s existing 21 states, thus representing the expansion of the operator’s cable business ambitions.
AT&T and BlackRock did not provide much details about the joint venture, including where new connections might be deployed in the United States. The business will be headed by Bill Hogg, a former network executive at AT&T, who agreed to return to lead the joint venture.
Among the few details, analysts focused on the deployment scale: 1.5 million locations, accounting for about 15% of Frontier’s target of 10 million locations by 2025.

The new joint venture between AT&T and BlackRock is called Gigapower, LLC. According to analysts at Wells Fargo, Gigapower’s planned 1.5 million fiber optic sites are significantly lower than the 4-5 million suggested in Bloomberg’s report.
Indeed, Gigapower’s plan pales in comparison to AT&T’s own ongoing optical network construction. AT&T will spend about US $4 billion every year to build up to 30 million optical fiber sites in its cable line footprint by 2025. So far, the company has built optical fiber in about 19 million locations.
Expanding its cable business will also enable AT&T to sell bundled cable and wireless services – a strategy that is gaining momentum across the industry. Tammy Parker, analyst of GlobalData, said in a statement: “AT&T should be able to take advantage of this dual technology capability to not only attract new customers and revenue streams, but also improve customer retention, because users who obtain multiple services from one operator are often more ‘sticky’ and are unlikely to turn to competitors.”
In the Gigapower plan of AT&T and BlackRock, the last noteworthy factor is that the joint venture plans to provide an open access platform. AT&T will be a fixed tenant of Gigapower, but other Internet providers will be able to sell their services through Gigapower’s network.
In fact, AT&T has already provided wholesale access to its optical fiber network under specific circumstances. For example, Sonic is selling Internet services through AT&T’s optical network. It is reported that the open access mode allows Gigapower to obtain some government funds from NTIA’s 42 billion dollar broadband rights, access and deployment plan.